Music: King as Queen?

The Beatles were still relative unknowns playing stale-smelling dives in Liverpool, and Bob Dylan was staring hopefully into the spotlights at Greenwich Village folk clubs. The vogue back in 1960 was something known as "uptown rhythm and blues"—the first attempt to make R. and B. more palatable to the white audience. Uptown R. and B, was so named not because any downtown brand existed, but because in the offices of what had once been New York's Tin Pan Alley, some of the best young white producers and writers were turning out new song material for all-black groups like the Shi-relies, the Drifters and the Cookies. The results were fascinating: though R. and B. lost some of its ethnic honesty, it still had considerable emotional sweep, plus a new sophistication.

No one wrote fancier uptown R. and B. than a young Jewish girl from Brooklyn named Carole King. Fast approaching 20, she and her first husband, a lyricist named Gerry Goffin, caught on early with songs like the Shirelles' Will You Love Me Tomorrow (1961) and the Drifters' Up on the Roof (1963). Masters at making their point quickly, their lyrics were predominantly simple, sentimental statements about love and loneliness, their melodies ingeniously brief.

Low Profile. The era of Dylan and the Beatles came—and now seems gone. Carole King remains. Neither she nor her music has changed all that much. Only now she is singing it herself, and seems about to become the new Queen of Rock. Her rise stems most immediately from her success as a soloist on a March-April national tour with her friend James Taylor (TIME cover. March 1), as well as the joyful delights to be found in a new King album, Tapestry (Ode). In less than two months, Tapestry has become the No. I album in the U.S., and a coupling of two of its songs, It's Too Late and I Feel the Earth Move, the No. 1 single.

As a performer, Carole has what might be charitably called a low musical profile. At a recent Carnegie Hall concert, she came out in an unpretentious print dress and sat down at the piano, alone on the stage and looking somewhat frail and plaintive. All that changed in seconds as she began thumping out a mesmerizing uh-uh, UH-UH, uh-uh, UH-UH bass rhythm, and then began to wail:

I feel the earth move under my feet I feel the sky tumbling down, I feel my heart start to tremblin', Whenever you're around.

Hue and Cry. Hers is far from a great natural voice, but it has the deceptive thin strength of a whip antenna. Its basic hue is a Canarsie twang that suggests Judy Holliday negotiating The Party's Over. But hue is one thing and cry another, as proved by Carole's pile-driving thrust in a number called Smackwater Jack, or her tender, searching way with the line, "Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever gonna make it home again."

Mostly, Carole writes songs that are well suited to today's nostalgia for old-fashioned romance, loneliness (So Far Away), love (Where You Lead) and fondness for children (Child of Mine).

In content, they are not so very different from the late Janis Joplin's, but worlds apart in style.